Take a Step Forward

Here at Monkey + Seal, we think we're off to a pretty good start for 2011. We just published two free guides to help other artists sell their art, and bum-ba-da-dum! We're here to announce that a full course on how to start selling your art is in the works. It'll be at least a few months worth of materials, advice, how-to's, worksheets, and more, starting from the very beginning, assuming that you're starting from scratch.

Anyhoo, we just wanted to take a bit of time to talk about the necessity of moving forward. Often, we think to ourselves "Only if X was true, we could do Y." But in reality, we are probably making excuses for ourselves.

Sometimes the "X" seems like it's something that we could never get. Whether it's a million dollars, or job security, or more free time, or feeling less tired after work, we always seem to talk ourselves into thinking that there will be a better time to do something. "If only I could save enough to quit my job for a few months, I could finish my portfolio." "If only I had more energy after work, I could work on my art." Phooey, we say.

Like we've said before, it all comes down to a matter of priority. If money is in the way, then I suggest you take a good hard look at your budget. How much do you spend on coffee, or eating out or on drinks? If a lack of energy is your issue, what sort of behaviors (like staying up late, or going out to party) could you cut out so you'd get more rest?

Often at Monkey's retail job, when he starts talking about the opportunity for people to take workshops, if they aren't interested, they usually give the excuse "I don't have enough time." Well, while this may be true for some people, Monkey seriously doubts it. How many hours do you spend on facebook, or watching TV, or playing video games? How many movies do you watch? The truth is not that they don't have enough time for workshops, but that they choose not to make time for workshops.

One thing to note is that while we highly endorse prioritizing your art (that's what we're here for, after all), we understand and recognize the need for a life as well. Sometimes you need that coffee, or need to take a break and spend an hour (or two) playing video games. We just hope that if you're really in pursuit of a more artistic life that you learn to strike more a balance between your art, other fun stuff, and the stuff that pays the rent.

That said, when you're going to sit down to work on your art, how many times do you let something (a phone call, or a text message, any sort of interruption, really) distract you? Now think about when you're hanging out with your best friend or you're on a date (an enjoyable one, that is), how often do you let something interrupt you in the same way? Chances are, not as often. While we don't endorse necessarily putting your art over the rest of your life, we do want you to analyze your priorities.

It is an amazing human quality to be able to somehow find a way to make things happen if you really want them to. If you can see your dream in front of you, all you have to do is take that first step, and you'll start setting things in motion that will make it easier for you to progress.

If you start managing your priorities today, you'll start to rewire your brain in order to make new habits and new routines that will be more conducive to your art. And if you think it's too late, you're wrong - it's never too late. It'll just be later.

Let us put it this way. If we could guarantee that if you worked hard for 5-7 years to chase your dream you would get it, would you start today, or wait a few years? You always need to start sometime, so why not today?

Happy Year of the Rabbit: Certainly a Friend of Monkey + Seal!

Hi Everyone!

Thank you again for another awesome year with us. We’re so happy to have a humble rooftop above us, brushes and canvas to paint with, and a tomorrow to look forward to. We hope you were able to reflect on your year with plenty of gratitude, forgiveness, lessons learned, re-commitments, and more space for a creative and adventurous life.

Here at Monkey + Seal, we have so many things to be grateful for over the past year. Through generous gifts, support, and chance meetings, we were both able to finish art school. We produced two successful gallery shows “Out of Place” and “Alienation.” (There have been talks for potentially a third show). We’ve both been individually scouted and booked for a collaborative show this June! Through all your wonderful responses, we’ve been able to blog three times a week and share our love of art, grow from one show a year to almost one every month, and offer more free guides to empower artists into making a living with their art. We’ve also ventured into our love of screen-printing and created some fun Tshirts. (We hope you like them too). Thank you to everyone who purchased our charity Tshirts, we’re very proud to announce that with your help, we were able to donate a subsequent amount to La Casa de La Madres, whose dedicated and constant work is to offer shelter, advocacy, and support services to battered women and their children.

Thank you dear old and new friends alike. We hope you’ll be along with us for the next phase of our adventures! This year, we’re looking to make a grand entrance in out-of-state art shows, publish a Monkey+Seal book, and perhaps dabble more into our love for animation. (Monkey also said he would take a dance class with Seal).

We would also like to always thank our readers and we hope to empower more artists to pursue their dreams by offering local workshops, words of wisdom, more free guides, and a more personal inner glimpse into our lives as working artists.

It’ll be a festive year! Without further a do:

Workshops in January

This January, we’ll both be teaching workshops at Big Umbrella Studios. To see the workshop schedule, please click here. Come spend time with us. It is our mission to make the classes affordable and a small teacher to student ratio. We’re very excited to see you flourish in your art whether through our class on with your own projects.

Free Guides

To start off the New Years, we’re giving out presents in the form of free guides. We're big advocates of artists in getting their art our there. Want to know how? You can download "The Psychology of Sales" and "7 Tips to Better Customer Service (for Craftspeople)." You can download the guides for free here!

Upcoming Monkey+Seal Shows

• Monkey (Rick Kitagawa) will be in a show in early March alongside with Grant Gilliland at Big Umbrella Studios. They'll be bringing the beasts back in their show "Bestiarum vocabulum."
• In June, both Monkey+Seal will be doing a collaborative split showat Oz Gallery in the Mission. Final dates TBA.

What are your goals for this year? What new horizons will you explore? What new heights will you reach?

“Unless you make the decision that things will be different, they most decidedly won’t be. This decision comes from a sense of hope and eagerness, and is centered in certainty that what you want is not only possible, not only probable, but inevitable.”

– Deanna Davis

2011 is Your Year!

As 2010 comes to a close, Monkey and Seal would like to thank everyone for their readership, for supporting us as we grow, and for being with us on our creative journey. We'll be taking a holiday break and resuming blog posts on January 5th, 2011. In the meantime, we'd like to encourage everyone to take a reflective moment to think back on this year and start up the new year with a bang!

It's a good habit to access: think about what you did well, what could be improved upon, and what you hope and dream for the future. Are you living the creative life you were meant to and deserved to live? What were some of your artistic triumphs? What are concrete changes and steps you can make even now, to clear up more space and time for your art? and the dreams you had long since held and yet to manifest? If you were the person you were meant to be in the most ideal environment and person, what would you accomplish? Now how can you get there, with what you have?

Start as you are now. Wherever you are, with whatever you are feeling, and who you are now. Begin it now.

We are hesitant only because in the past we have broken so many resolutions and promises. That unfinished project, the unused clothes rotting away in the closet, that weight loss program we failed to stick to, that job we failed to go after. The mere thought of planning brings about shame and disappointments. But let us tell you a little secret: human beings since the beginning of time are biologically geared to inaction. It is natural to do nothing, rather than create, or exercise, or get up and do things. We like our cave, we survive in the cave. But this is all the more reason for why we need plans. We need resolution. We need re-commitments.

Make the choice right now, at this very moment to re-commit to an adventurous life.

The other secret to resolutions and planning, is that life is an ocean. As a navigator who charts your path in life, you constantly need to re-assess and adjust to the waves and changes in weather. Sure, you got off track with that "blank," (job, project, relationship, program, etc.) but simply, without any drama, get out your compass, find your course, and adjust your sails to put yourself back on track. The resolutions that fail are the ones that are rigid and unforgiving. It'd be easier to take small steps and allow for some slips, rather than charging and having an inflexible plan.

We know that taking action is scary - what if we fail? What if something goes amiss? Well, two things to keep in mind are 1)How bad can it really be if you fail, and 2)Failure is what success are born out of. Most empires aren't built on their first try. Rowland Hussey Macy (of Macy's the department store fame), started four stores which all failed before getting it right with what would eventually come to be a department store empire boasting over 800 stores across the nation. Even Abraham Lincoln ended up failing twice at a run for Senate before he managed to get elected as the President who would lead the country through the Civil War and oh, just completely end slavery in the United States.

Fear is natural and healthy (especially if you're being chased by wolverines), but as paralyzing as it can be at times, we need to learn to dissolve it and choose to take action. As much as we hope we inspire you with our blog and our workshops, we can't drag you out of your cave and make you create. We can't force you to apply for that job, or watch over you while you paint. All we can do is invite you to take the next step with us and commit to action. 2011 can be your year, so take hold of it and let's create something wonderful together!

Monkey + Seal are planning on bringing more guides, more workshops, and more cool stuff in 2011, and we'd like you to be right there along with us. So take a break (or two), spend some time with people you like, and we'll see you bright and early in the next year!

Making Your Stop-Doing List

While we all have our daily "to-do" lists, we sometimes advocate that people should come up with a "stop-doing" list. Just as important as getting the important work done is weaning oneself off of bad habits and reprogramming your brain to follow more productive habits.

While the occasional jaunt down the information superhighway is just fine and dandy, and thanks to Google a lot of reference is just a click away (although if at all possible, we recommend using your own reference), spending hours playing Zuma Blitz (*cough Monkey cough*) doesn't do anyone any good.

While we totally support fun little breaks and the like, we just want to address any major bad habits - and nowadays, many of these habits end up in the form of constant Facebook browsing or randomly selecting wikipedia articles to read.

Creating a stop-doing list is a good way to honestly evaluate what sort of behaviors and habits aren't working for you. If you're doing well and you're finding time to get everything done, then great. But if you aren't, it may be wise to evaluate how much time you're really putting into your work and how much time you're putting into reading Gawker or the Onion.

If you aren't sure what needs to go onto your Stop-Doing list, perhaps you should try to take notes on your day. How much time are you REALLY spending on your painting? How much time are you spending on marketing? Playing video games? Watching TV? Once you start taking notes of when you start and stop doing things, the picture becomes a lot clearer, especially when you figure out that your break has lasted for an hour and a half.

If you're doing everything that you want to be doing, maybe try making a Do-Less-Of list instead. That way you can more properly realign your priorities. Maybe take the comic book reading down from an hour to fifteen minutes a day. Maybe take out watching that extra TV show that you watch just because it's after your favorite crime drama. That's an extra hour and a half that you could spend working.

Alternatively, if you're hustling non-stop, maybe you might need to take it down a notch so you can actually enjoy life. Instead of spending that extra fifteen minutes writing an extra blog post, you could spend that time catching up with a friend.

We're not productivity fascists that want you to overwork yourself. The main point about budgeting your time and making evaluations about what you're spending your time on is to really think about what is necessary and focus on that. Whether you're overworked or overplayed, finding the right balance in your life is what it's all about.

Taking Advice for What It's Worth

It's sort of a funny thing to give people the advice to question advice, but that's what we're here to do today. So make sure you even take this with a grain of salt.

You see, Monkey + Seal are big fans of taking advice and well-meaning suggestions and that sort of thing in context. Why? Because no one knows you like you know yourself (in theory..sometimes Monkey thinks Seal knows him better than he knows himself). Often times Monkey + Seal will buy information products (ie. books or e-books or guides) to help further their knowledge base. However, we know that not everything everyone says will exactly apply to us.

While it might be nice to start up an e-business that can make us $30k a year in a few months of really hard work, it's not really what we do. We'd much rather go the arguably harder route of doing silly things like making pictures and selling them, and teaching other artists about how they can do the same. Sometimes business models just don't work for us or our plans, and we just learn from them and move on. Sometimes they will provide a valuable insight on how we can adapt our own plans in an innovative way - but either way, we have to evaluate the information for ourselves.

An example of "advice" that artists often hear which can be totally contradictory revolves around pricing. Many of us have heard the story of that one artist who "suddenly" raises their prices to astronomical rates and becomes the biggest thing around. If we take this at face value, then shouldn't we all start selling 16x20 paintings for $4000? Alternatively, we hear that we need to lower our prices as in a struggling economy, a "luxury" item like art needs to come down in price as people don't have as much money to spend. Faced with these conflicting pieces of information, do we raise or lower our prices?

Well, it depends. The artist who suddenly had the price jump in their paintings probably suddenly went from showing in a cafe to showing in a well-established gallery. The gallery wouldn't let you charge $200 for a 16x20 since it's not worth their wallspace, while if you're showing in a cafe you probably won't run into someone willing to drop $4000 on a painting (but then again it also depends where you are). Alternatively, if you're already selling work and you lower your price, suddenly collectors might think that you're devaluing your work and then people might stop buying altogether.

The correct answer is that it depends on you. We can't answer all the questions for you, but can only advice you really exploring and figuring out if any given piece of information is right for you and your situation. We can always (and will) let you know what has worked for us, but you have to take that information and figure out if it'll work for you in your situation.

All in all, the message to take home is that there are no easy answers. Without sitting down and talking one-on-one with you, most guides and books will only take you so far (although sometimes you'll find a writer who works perfect for you!). It's up to you to sift through the advice and get to what is your own personal answer. Good luck!

Coaching Your Inner Artist

Illustration Friday Painting by Seal

On the days you want to quit most, there is a tiny voice inside of each of us that says, "You can still do this." "All is not lost." "What if we try this." or "That might be interesting." And on the days you succeed, it congratulates you. "Way to go!" "I knew you could do it." "That wasn't so bad."

If you have ever played a sport, cheering on your artistic endeavors is much like being a sports coach. Different challenges call for different tactics, and as the coach of your inner artist, you have to know your team and you have to know what you're up against. Are you a procrastinator? Timid artist who doesn't like to pitch their ideas in person? Do you have a great batting average, but only when you've had enough sleep? As artists, we need to be our own coach. We need to know what it is we need, what is holding us back, and the tips and game play we need to move forward with our art. If you are a procrastinator, find out why art is so painful for you, find ways to manage expectations and time for projects. If you are shy about selling your own art, hire an agent/manager, enroll in speech class, or practice in front of a friend or in the shower. If you are the type who can't do anything creative until you have that nap, then gosh darn it, take that nap and fully rest or decide to push through.

Every day, from the moment you wake up, there are many negative obstacles blocking you from creating that day. Your friend calls to have lunch, then lunch turns to an entire afternoon. Your painting is left un-touched. You finally wrote that novel and the publisher who promised you great advance on royalty, decided in the end that they had a "better candidate in mind." Your art rival is making headway and landing the job, that you applied for. The cat needed to be fed first before you craft. etc. etc. As artists, we tend to be very giving with our time. Too giving. But since we cannot build a wall around ourselves and we choose to live this life with the people in it, we must learn to center ourselves and coach ourselves back to focus "on the game," our love, that is art.

So how do we do this? First of all, as our own creative coach, we need to know our team. We must be very honest with ourselves and fess up to our biggest culprit. What is the most negative anti-creative force in your life right now? Do you spend too much time dilly dallying? To tell you the truth, Seal is a workaholic. She keeps herself very busy. Too busy, in fact, to work on her own personal art. Because, YES, it is much easier to work on everything else, except her personal art -- because it is personal. And personal means, we are invested, we must pour our hearts out. And that is scary!

What is your worst creative enemy? As your very own inner creative coach, how do you get yourself off the bench and into the game of creating?

Some coaches Coax: "C'mon, you can do it. Come out kitty kitty"
use Bribery: "If you paint today, I'll reward you with 1 hour reading time."
Pushing/Prodding: "You're almost at the finish line. Now push through it!" (You're almost finished with that novel!"
Tough Love: "No more excuses, you are going to create, right now."
Threats (doesn't work for Seal, but perhaps others might respond to this method): "Sew this plush toy now, or else (you'll get a late dinner, etc, etc.)
Compromise/ baby steps: "If you do this now, then I will . . . " "Okay, how about just 15 minutes of creativity today"

They all work to some degree, it's just about finding out which ones work for you best and for what circumstances. For example, Seal really hates being threatened. She will react in the opposite and shut down instead. "Then, fine. I won't create at all." And there are days when she needs to be pushed with tough love, rather than coaxed. Only you know, what you truly need.

As a coach, you are a dreamer ("the big game"), a realist (we are 5th in the league, but not dead last, nor the best team), a practitioner (you are also the artist that knows the game best). You must employ equip yourself with supportive resources and must be ready to pull up any number of repertoire of tricks up your sleeve to get you to play your best in your art.

Every day you will have to review your plan, chart your course, and create. Every day you will sit with rejection, disappointment, and successes. Every day you will re-evaluate and re-commit yourself to your craft. And never forget to always celebrate your successes, however big or small. Will you take on the meaningful task at hand?

We believe you will. After all, inside each one of us, is an artist and dreamer at heart.

--

For further reading: Eric Maisel's Coaching the Artist Within

Managing Expectations

Monkey + Seal hold ourselves up to high expectations. While this is usually a good thing to strive and work and bust your behind to make it to the top, it's always a good thing to make a clear distinction in what expectations you hold to yourself. That distinction is doing your absolute best, and doing your best given the circumstances.

The difference is that your absolute best is probably a near-impossible level of work to keep up with any sort of consistency. If you were doing your best 100% of the time, you wouldn't have time to eat, sleep, or do anything that is remotely relaxing. Your stress levels would be so high you wouldn't be digesting your food (assuming you ate anything). It's an unrealistic expectation.

This is not to say that you shouldn't try, or that you shouldn't push yourself. Especially with working with clients and deadlines, sometimes you do have to push past what you think you can do and do that 30-hour day, or finish those five paintings in twelve hours. However, when you work yourself that hard, you're going to burn out. The crash isn't fun, and the whole experience generally isn't that fun either.

What you should aim for is that you do your very best given the circumstances. If you forgot the box of your highest selling comic and only brought the old stuff that no one buys, you can't expect to do the sales that you would have. But, you can do your very best given the circumstances and figure out how to sell what you do have. Or you can lose an hour of sales to leave and go get the comics. Or you could buy some paper and a pen and start selling one-of-a-kind comics that you draw there and then.

Basically, while we strongly promote setting lofty goals and expectations, make sure you realize that sometimes life doesn't always work out the way you want it to, but you shouldn't let those bumps derail you. Do not let missing a mark end your career. Use the missed goal as a learning experience, and as long as you did the best you could given the circumstances, you can walk away knowing that you did all that you could.